By Jade Garratt In our experience, the most effective lever for increasing psychological safety within a team is flattening the power gradient – the gap between those with the most power and those with the least. In practice, this usually […]
By Jade Garratt In our experience, the most effective lever for increasing psychological safety within a team is flattening the power gradient – the gap between those with the most power and those with the least. In practice, this usually […]
The Speaking up Myth By Jade Garratt In the world of psychological safety, we focus a lot, maybe even too much, on the speaking up side of the equation. How do we make sure people speak up with their ideas, […]
By Jade Garratt How do you feel when you hear the words “You have a body“? And how do you feel when you hear it in a work context? You might find it confusing – a kind of “well, obviously”, or […]
Typologies of Power In a few previous newsletters, we’ve gotten into power dynamics, power gradients, “power over” vs “power for” and “power to” (see Mary Parker Follett). Steep power gradients are the number one inhibitor of psychological safety, and addressing […]
The Chatham House Rule By Jade Garratt We always begin our workshops with a social contract. These are important because they make sure at the very beginning, that we’re on the same page in terms of our expectations of each […]
(DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) We’ve recently seen more and more people (almost always white, straight men) jumping on the “DEI didn’t work” bandwagon, even some who are prominent in the psychological safety domain. And it’s really worrying, so […]
Psychological Safety and Neurodiversity The field of psychological safety often focuses on neurotypical contexts. Psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that a group is safe for interpersonal risk taking. In practice, this seems simple; individuals speaking up, sharing […]
The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. One of the (many) barriers to speaking up is the knowledge or perception that your voice doesn’t carry as much weight as someone else’s. This can be particularly common when in the presence of those […]
The Interrelationship between Psychological Safety And Wellbeing When we talk about psychological safety in our workshops and sessions, the concept of wellbeing almost always comes up. This makes sense, since psychological safety is essentially about how people feel at work. […]
The Pac-Man rule One of the main reasons to go to a conference, event or meetup is to meet people and have interesting conversations. I’ve found myself at day-long conferences where I’ve not attended a single talk, and instead found […]
Ten Ways to Foster Psychological Safety in the Workplace We’ve been reflecting on our last few years of experience delivering psychological safety workshops, training and consultancy in organisations around the world. Based on all those wonderful experiences, working with industries […]
Personal Experiences of Psychological Safety through Education By Beatriz Poyton In schools, psychological safety is hard to create but easy to destroy. My own feelings of psychological safety, and willingness to put myself and my ideas forward at school were […]
In the real world, psychological safety is political. There are some who say that psychological safety isn’t political. We think it is. What does “political” mean? At its broadest level, politics determine the ways people in groups make decisions. This […]
I can say whatever I want! When I met up with Amy Edmondson recently in Boston (yes, this is a humblebrag and I’m owning it!) we discussed one of the prevalent misconceptions around psychological safety: that it means we can say […]
Guest Post by Beatriz Poyton The term psychological safety is believed to have originated in 1954 by clinical psychologist Carl Rogers. William Kahn has since defined psychological safety as “the sense of being able to show and employ one’s self […]
Psychological Safety at Work Psychological Safety in Schools This is an excellent piece on the EdCan Network website on the importance and dynamics of psychological safety for students. The authors make a few key points – psychological safety and inclusion […]
Psychological Safety at Work Lean and psychological safety Here’s a great analysis by Ben Hutchinson of a paper examining the relationship between Lean and psychological safety in construction projects in the US. This combines two of my favourite subjects so […]
Telling the boss bad news twice. Soon after I graduated from university with my degree in ecology, I got a job as an Experimentalist at Jealott’s Hill Research Station, Berkshire. I worked in a department called “Weed Science” (yes, it does […]
Team performance isn’t the only reason that we foster psychological safety. We also do it because we want people to feel fulfilled in their jobs, we don’t want people to leave a team because they don’t feel included, we want people to experience less unnecessary stress and have greater mental wellbeing, we want to foster greater diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, we foster psychological safety because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do.
Psychological Safety in 2023 Thanks so much for all your support, feedback, encouragement, ideas, insights and collaboration over 2023! It’s genuinely a privilege to be able to do this work, and I appreciate every single one of you. I recently […]
Guest post by Navya Adhikarla, graduate student in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University (Don’t) Look me in the Eye: The Challenge of Eye Contact “Look me in the eye and tell me you are not lying,” […]
Stutters and Stammers I’ve written previously about my experience growing up with dyspraxia, which I was diagnosed with at an early age. My dyspraxia made it difficult for me to pronounce and articulate certain sounds (called phonemes), and meant that I […]
Verbally Speaking Up at Work Speaking with a client this week, we surfaced an interesting organisational antipattern to psychological safety. Sometimes, within an organisation, there exists an unwritten rule: voice your concerns, but only do it verbally in a call or meeting where […]
Psychological Safety: What it isn’t. Psychological safety has become a hot topic recently, for good reason and hopefully this will result in better, safer, and more inclusive workplaces for everyone. However, the rise in its popularity has led to a […]
Data Visualisation In the psychsafety.com measurement workshop we cover a lot: research ethics, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies, formulating research questions, survey design, and communicating our findings. As part of that, we look at data visualisation, including this classic example: The Broad Street […]